This sounds super exciting and I sure wish I could be participating in it. Maybe things are moving toward an upswing. I read this article here about Native folks and the inauguration, and the comments section is really interesting too.

What are you all out there doing specifically for the big day?

I remember hearing somewhere than during the Cold War whenever the US brought something up related to human rights the USSR would rebut with “well, you enslaved people.”  Course, serfdom was roughly the same, but it seemed to cow people back then.

A quote from the article about Europe:

But Ms. Kiyak said the Obama victory was causing significant reflection in the immigrant community, if not yet in the country at large. “Minorities see what is possible in another country, and they become jealous,” she said, noting that President Abdullah Gul of Turkey said recently in Der Spiegel that Turkish Germans “should take part in German society and politics and not look back.”

Engaging is good.  Not looking back – problematic.  It kind of falls into what I think is the trap of colorblindedness – saying you’re colorblind to mean non-discrimination takes away the culture and identity of so many people involuntarily – and it’s a terrible thing to take away people’s cultures.  It means that everyone is the same in silly ways – we all grew up the same, we all communicate in the same ways, we all have the same hopes and dreams.  And that’s a dead end as everyone can’t share the American Dream or whatever group consciousness colorblind people seem to advocate.  In the basic sense of the word, we don’t go, wow, it’s great you can’t see the color red.  Blindness is a deficiency, not an asset.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-11-05/obama-headlines-from-around-the-world

lol...

Finally!

Of course, correlation isn’t causation, and there may be a lot more to this association (thanks Epi) but this also may be a handy quick guide to living if you prefer to live in more integrated environments, too.  If there were on a per-city or smaller unit than by state…hmmm….and now I’m intrigued by this Dissimilarity Index they used for the horizontal axis.  He also discusses methodology at the end of the post with some neat stats things if you’re into that.

Anywho, just saying.  Hoping to get this final debate off of youtube to watch with my fellow politics-interested folks out here.

Then, this made me shake my head: Forum sells ‘Obama Waffles’ with racial stereotype.

I rather wonder if I were more right-leaning if it would be the other way around.  But I’m not sure…they’re both making fun of people, really…hmm.

Conservatives need to stop denying reality. The stagnation of the incomes of middle-class Americans is a fact. And only by acknowledging facts can we respond effectively to the genuine difficulties of voters in the middle. We keep offering them cuts in their federal personal income taxes — even though two-thirds of Americans pay more in payroll taxes than in income taxes, and even though a majority of Americans now describe their federal income tax burden as reasonable.

What the middle class needs most is not lower income taxes but a slowdown in the soaring inflation of health-care costs. If health-insurance costs had risen 50 percent rather than 100 percent over the Bush years, middle-income voters would have enjoyed a pay raise instead of enduring wage stagnation.

Myself, it seems I fit better into the progressive box rather than a party label.  Just because I don’t support the Republicans now doesn’t mean I wouldn’t in the future if I saw some real change.  Think: a government that actually is working for people…that’s what’s important.

So, in grand order of the title above:

Buyant death march
Some PCV came up with a cool idea to take a long hike to visit another volunteer then take a car back. Due to the weather (it snowed an incredible amount – about 4″) the Friday night before, we instead decided to take the car there then hike back so as to let the snow/bad weather recede a little. So, we already knew it was 25km (~15 1/2 miles) by the road, but we were going to follow a river back, so it was likely going to be a bit farther than that. Big-ass hiking boots, check. Layers, check. Bullion-cube-in-case-we-get-hopelessly-lost-and-need-flavoring-per-travel-recommendations, check. What I didn’t take into account was how snow affects the basic concept of walking. That snow really saps a lot of your energy, and we had these land mogul-type humps near open bodies of (frozen-ish) water that, when covered with snow, hid where the divots between them were, so it was really easy to slip and fall if you misjudged a bump. The snow factor probably took the most out of me – I was a little nervous of getting my pants wet if I couldn’t see where ice was thin (under that snow) in wet areas, but that didn’t happen too much. I’m also lucky that my boots didn’t give me blisters – I know some people got em just after the first third of the hike and a few more did by the end. There was wind on and off too which we tended to walk into…

Still, in retrospect it was really fun – some pictures are being uploaded to Picasa, and we had some silly times and neat things to see. We found and returned a lost baby goat, saw a huge (eagle’s?) nest up in some rocks, jumped over/made rock stepping stones various rivers, and likely startled unknown numbers of countryside-dwellers with the sight of 11 foreigners tramping around in the middle of nowhere. I also near the very end almost fell (off a mogul of course) face-first into a huge pile of horse shit, which made me quite grumpy at the time.

It’s also the farthest by, oh, 10 miles at least, that I’ve ever walked, so I’m happy that I survived it. We may go on another death march, but perhaps with an overnight camping break, as it’s about half again as far as this soum. Only in Mongolia do 11 people of varying states of fitness decide to go on a 15+ mile hike after a relatively heavy snowfall and in freezing weather…

The return of vodka
On April Fool’s, coincidentally a local PCV’s birthday, vodka appeared back on the shelves all over Khovd. Insert expected shenanigans here, esp. as many people are not working this week due to school breaks. I also got to eat tasty lemon cookies.

Link of my day
As posted on Slashdot, Skewz is an unfortunately named website that does a really cool thing – it sorts news online using user submissions (on a continuum) from liberal to conservative. The submitted links also have a sort of meta-commentary in that the links with their associated blurb can have comments on their slant, and the comments themselves can be rated on a liberal-conservative continuum. That’s definitely a feature I’d like to see on other comment sections, though tagging is another idea. But the continuum idea tends to limit, obviously – but I’d also be interested in seeing continua for other slants – libertarian, etc – as the ideological spectrum is more than the one-dimensional “left” and “right”.